Woopra – Live Analytics for your Web Site

March 30, 2008

At WordCamp Dallas yesterday, John Pozadzides (of One Man’s Blog) gave us a sneak peak at Woopra — the hottest Web Analytics tool I’ve seen in a very long time.
Adding Woopra to your site involves just adding a simple piece of Javascript to the footer of your site (there’s even a simple plugin for WordPress users), and downloading the Woopra client — the client runs in Java, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

(a small caveat on Mac support — The Woopra client requires Java 6, which is only available in beta from Apple Developer Connection. The Java 6 beta, in turn, only works on Intel Macs running Tiger or Leopard, so PowerPC (G4, G5) folks are out of luck, at least for the time being.)

But what a client — this thing is the Swiss Army Knife of web analytics — it gives you all of the usual stuff a good analytics program does, but it does it live — in real time. You can see users as they come onto your site and move from page to page — you can even open up a chat with them (if you want to totally freak them out). John was nice enough to give out beta invitations to everybody at WordCamp, and I’m still just totally amazed at this thing.

To give you a better idea, here’s a video of Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell of GeekBrief TV getting a walkthrough of Woopra from John yesterday:

The bad news is that Woopra is in a real limited private beta at the moment, however John has offered to possibly give out a few more invitations here (One Man’s Blog) if you want to try to get one.

Woopra stands to seriously raise the expectations bar for web analytics. I don’t know what the pricing structure is liable to be when it goes public, but if you’re shopping for a new stats system, I’d hold tight a little while longer.